Finale
by Verok
Summary: Sherlock Holmes had always enjoyed acting. He just never imagined how much it would hurt to have to act before John, before the Fall. One-shot, Sherlock's POV, near the end of 2x03  SPOILERS


_Finale_

by Verok

Summary: Sherlock Holmes had always enjoyed acting. He just never imagined how much it would hurt to have to act before John, before the Fall. One-shot, Sherlock's POV, near the end of 2x03 (SPOILERS)

AN: John might be the emotional focal point for _The Reichenbach Fall_, but what really hit me hard when watching (and rewatching) the finale was what Sherlock must have been going through when he realised that winning against Moriarty meant having to deceive John along with everyone else. Sherlock has always hidden himself away beneath masks, so how does he feel when he gets denied his last chance to be honest with John? Kudos to the BBC writers, who have done a fantastic job bringing out Sherlock's theatrical inclinations, and especially to Benedict Cumberbatch, whose tremendous performance was the inspiration for this one-shot. Few things can be harder than portraying a person who is trying to act, and bringing out the fragility of the character's performance within the actual performance. He pulled it off in spades, and it was heartbreaking. Anyway, enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own this.

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><p>It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.<p>

_- _Arthur Conan Doyle, _A Scandal in Bohemia_

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><p>If "consulting detective" hadn't been an option, Sherlock Holmes would certainly have gone for "actor."<p>

It was one thing he enjoyed almost as much as solving crimes. Good detectives and good actors were feathers of a bird: attentive toward details, adept at reading characters, an inch cleverer than everyone else. He lived for deductions, but performing his way toward one was even better. A tirade or a tear to loosen up a witness, an alter ego and costume to let him hunt in broad daylight: those were the moments when the Game really quickened his blood.

Jim Moriarty showed a magnificent sense of irony, then, in casting Sherlock as the star of his grotesque play. He'd known how much Sherlock loved to play roles. And this one, the Fraud, promised to draw the biggest audience he'd ever have.

Yet it was not the thought of how stupid he'd been or how utterly out-manoeuvred he was that sickened him as he whirled out of Kitty Riley's house into the damp night.

It wasn't even the deduction that followed, his realisation of how Moriarty's play had to end.

"There's something I need to do," he muttered.

"What, can I help?"

"No. I'm on my own."

He strode away, willing himself to ignore the hurt and anger and confusion he could feel eddying from John like heat. Because if he had to play the part, he had to start now.

He had one last act to perform – not Moriarty's, but his own.

A one-man act with John Watson sitting front and centre in the audience.

And nothing could prepare him for how much it would hurt.

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><p>He had discovered acting as a young child and, being Sherlock, had promptly proceeded to explore its uses with scientific rigour and thoroughness. Since then, he'd been acting in front of everyone, pulling strings to achieve his own ends. Manipulation suited him, and he became a consummate thespian.<p>

John had been no cleverer or wiser than any other audience member. In fact, John made an especially good audience, because he was so pliable. Soon Sherlock had compiled a catalogue of Theatrical Ways To Push John Watson's Buttons. _Languor_, to have John make the tea and do the shopping. _Disinterest_, so John would do more of the legwork for the case that might or might not turn out to be interesting. _Tranquility_, so John wouldn't ask questions about the sabre-wielding assassin that had stopped by the flat a moment ago.

Indeed, it mystified him that John had been so surprised and angry about the traumatic lock-in at Baskerville being an experiment (perfect laboratory conditions – did the good doctor not appreciate science?) and the sugar-laced coffee being merely a pretend gesture of apology. It was John's fault he hadn't learned Sherlock's ways by now. _You see, John, but as ever you do not observe_.

If he'd done nothing but act before John, then surely it wouldn't be so hard to do the same in the last few hours they had together.

But it was. Nothing had ever been harder.

As a measure of defence, he spoke only of nuts and bolts, leads and deductions – things to keep John's mind anchored somewhere else when his whirled in a tailspin_. The computer code. Destroy Richard Brook. Bring back Jim Moriarty. He left it in the flat, John – where did he leave it?_

But his hand fumbled restlessly with the bouncy ball, and even when the jolt of a fresh deduction lit his mind, it quickly subsided under the noise of confused emotions clamouring for expression.

_Will you keep thinking about the puzzle, John, so I won't have to worry about you seeing through my trembling eggshell of a mask?_

When John's mobile rang, Sherlock was almost relieved, even though he knew exactly what the call signified: that their time together was up.

"She's dying, Sherlock. Let's go."

He decided to go for his oldest role, his most comfortable one, but even this one felt perilous at the moment. He would have to lay it on thick, and not just for John.

"You go. I'm busy."

"Busy?"

_Piss-poor, that deadpan. Stillness will accentuate the indifference, help cover up_. "Thinking. I need to think."

"You need to – Doesn't she mean anything to you? You once half-killed a man because he laid a finger on her."

"She's my landlady."

_Avoid eye contact. Usually not a problem for you, but God you're such a wreck today. What's happened to you?_

"She's dying, you _machine_ – Sod this. Sod. This. You stay here, on your own, if you want."

The words were out before Sherlock could check them, but the lapse in character, fortunately, mercifully, all too easily misinterpreted as being exactly the opposite.

"Alone is what I have. Alone protects me."

_When I am alone, I don't have to pretend. When I am alone, I'm not acting. Molly had been right all along. Please go, John, please get the hell out of here before I lose it entirely and show you that I actually do care and don't want you to think I'm a machine and don't want you to go but have to let you go because I care about you and want you out of the way._

"No," said John, flinging open the door. "_Friends_ protect people."

The slamming of the door felt like a punch to the gut.

Sherlock took a trembling breath. He'd succeeded. John was convinced that there was nothing suspicious with the call and that all would be well with Sherlock, all because Sherlock was being his usual inhuman self. He was supposed to be feeling relieved.

Instead, he felt sick.

At that moment he finally understood the real reason why he'd spent his whole life acting. It didn't only make him feel powerful and clever. It protected him. The terrain of his face, the geography of his heart: he'd known neither before John, and after John he'd been too afraid to reveal either. Machine felt so much safer than Human.

But now, when for the first time ever he wanted to take back every callous remark and simulation of indifference and would have given anything to show John what he felt – that he hated being alone, that he was terrified of everything to come, that he didn't want to let John go – _everything_, cruelty of cruelties, hinged upon his not doing so.

John had probably reached the stairwell by now. Sherlock's mind whirred along, calculating how long it would take John to double back from Baker Street, how many minutes Moriarty had just bought for his final act with the distraction. But all the varying estimations of minutes and seconds sank under the overpowering, overwhelming thought that even if John were to make it back in time before the Fall, it would not matter. Sherlock would not get to speak to him as himself. There would only be more deception, more pain to mask, more despair at all the chances for honest conversations forever lost.

John had left him forever.

He drilled a hole through the door with his eyes and recycled his mantra in his head. _Alone is what I have. Alone protects me._

Except for this one time. This time, it was no protection against the edge of his private despair. It was only protection for John, who was once again disappointed in Sherlock, who didn't know, and who could not know.

_Yes, John, friends do protect people. God help me_.

The chime of Moriarty's incoming text rescued him from himself.

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><p>He'd known Moriarty would not tolerate a half-finished production, even in death. The anecdote about Johann Sebastian Bach had been the most telling of clues (or warnings) from his archenemy: no abandoned melodies, no fall of the curtain without the Fall of the Reichenbach Hero.<p>

It did not help much, though, knowing that this production was his as much as the psychotic playwright's. There was still a final scene to play, and the savage elegance of Moriarty's creation could not be contravened.

He almost could not bear the sight of the taxi pulling up across the street below, even though it was also the only thing he wanted to see.

John looked tiny where he stood, too small for Sherlock to make out his features, and surely too far away for him to see Sherlock's. But the distance was merely a cruel illusion. Every shuddering breath sounded ten times louder through a mobile.

In a lifetime spent acting, he'd never known reciting lines could be such torture.

"I – I – I can't come down, so we'll … we'll just have to do it like this."

"What's going on?"

John's tone of guileless confusion dislodged Sherlock from the scene at hand. For one instant he forgot he was acting and that there was a script to follow. Instead he found himself transported back to all the other moments he'd felt this same, cold mortification of exposure – the moments he'd found it utterly impossible to act before John.

He was standing before John just after the latter had shot the cabbie, too weakened by the onslaught of astonished gratitude to muster his mask of indifference.

He was wheeling about by the pool, rapping the Browning against his thigh and head as terror and fierce affection coursed through him like the high of a drug.

He was in the graveyard at Dartmoor, ashamed of himself, desperate to explain how his harsh words could actually have been tender ones too.

In that instant he wished there had been a million more such moments.

"An apology," he said aloud.

_I'm sorry, John, that I can't speak as myself. I'm saying the lines Moriarty wrote for me. Please, believe them. Please believe them even though it will probably kill you to do so and kill me as well but in an entirely different way. It's the only way to make things easier. Please._

"It's all true. Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty."

Every word took supreme effort, and he hoped John would hear reticence and shame in the low rasp in his voice - not the struggle to subdue Sherlock Holmes.

"Why are you saying this?" John demanded.

Still the tone of disbelief, but there was rising anger now too. John was no fool – had never been – and at that thought something broke inside Sherlock.

Pain and grief and hatred of Moriarty and love for John too great to bear raged up in him, and the tears finally came, a lifetime's worth, spilling out and blurring the London skyline.

He owed John better in this last conversation of theirs, and yet here he was still trying valiantly to dissemble, too much of a coward to contemplate breaking his deception.

It broke his heart he could not tell John the truth, or how right John was, or how much he loved John for refusing to be a fool.

He wept out of shame and sickness at the thought that these tears, his honest tears, somehow had to become a part of his performance.

And all he could do was to weep harder, because it was the only honest thing he could do – showing John how much it hurt, how much all of _this_ hurt.

"I'm a fake."

_Yes, John, I am. I'm being one right now, can't you see?_

"The newspapers were right all along. I want you to tell Lestrade, I want you to tell Mrs. Hudson, and Molly. In fact, tell anyone who'll listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes."

He was sure he sounded like a blubbering mess over the phone. John was protesting again, something about their first meeting and Harry and Sherlock being too clever to be fake, and Sherlock had to cut in.

"Nobody could be that clever," he said curtly. _Please, John_, stop.

"_You_ could!"

He laughed even as John's words, the earnestness and anguish in John's voice, split his heart in two. _Oh, John_. Again he was back in the past, reliving their first taxi ride together, and he remembered how he'd flushed and had to look away from John during that dusky journey to Brixton when he heard that word, a soul-bending word: "Amazing." Many had praised Sherlock, but only John's praise had ever touched him.

_You're the one who's amazing, John. It's not my powers of deduction that are miraculous – it's the way you make me feel._

"It's a trick," he said quietly. "Just a magic trick."

"Stop it now!"

John was moving, and for an instant Sherlock almost lost the will to intervene. Letting John in on the deception was the only thing that might have made the prospect of life after the Fall – the long, lonely march in the twilight of simulated death – bearable.

But it could not be risked. The play had to succeed, however much he wished it could fail. The spectator could not be allowed to stumble onto the stage.

He held out an arm to command John to stop, and even after John had obeyed, he kept it aloft, straining for the man he wished desperately he could touch just one more time.

"Please, will you do this for me?" he begged.

_Please let me finish this_. _Please let me end it now, so I can stop lying to you and killing myself. Please._

John was reaching for him too, he could see, even through his veil of tears.

"This phone call … it's my note. It's what people do, don't they? Leave a note."

"Leave a note _when_?"

And then there was suddenly not enough air in his lungs to say more. He knew he was allowed just two more words, because he could not trust himself with a third - he knew what he would say if he had three.

"Goodbye, John."

He threw away his phone as John cried out below.

He inched toward the edge and, in order to steel his frayed nerves, mentally ran through his list of preparations – the reassurances that this was still just a show, and that he would walk away from this role alive.

The lorry heaped with rubbish bags, parked just below. The cyclist waiting in the wings with the syringe. Molly Hooper, his invisible stage manager; half a dozen extras; the backstage crew on loan from Mycroft.

This play was ready to end.

He rocked on the balls of his feet and tipped forward, but as Gravity's hand took over, the worst of all possible unbidden thoughts entered his head.

He realised he didn't care much whether he'd survive this, the Grand Finale, or not. Acting before John in their last moment together had already killed him in every way that mattered.

The howling of wind in his ears was great.

* * *

><p>He'd thought the Fall would be the Grand Finale, and yet the Play was not done. Rather, it had merely become his entire life.<p>

Sherlock Holmes was now playing Dead, and he did not know when he would get to stop.

Pretending to be a dead man, as it turned out, was even trickier than any impersonation of a living man he'd taken on. His audience, for one, was everyone and no one at the same time: he could not be seen by anyone except by the lone two people he'd taken into his confidence, and hiding in plain sight was fast getting dull when it was the only thing he did.

Today, however, he didn't have to don a disguise. The cemetery was deserted except for two others, and neither would be paying much attention to their surroundings.

He huddled in his greatcoat under a cypress and watched from afar as the landlady departed, leaving a lone figure standing at attention before the headstone.

"You were the best man … and the most human … _human_ being that I've ever known, and no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie."

He could barely hear John's voice at this distance, but the man's gestures and body language, the angle of his head and the way his fingers ghosted painfully over the marble, were enough for him to know what he was saying.

"I was _so_ alone, and I owe you _so_ much."

If he was supposed to be playing a dead man, he was failing miserably this moment. Dead men didn't have trembling hands and prickling eyes and invisible fingers clenching around their throats.

"Please, there's just one more thing … One more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't. Be. Dead. Would you do that, just for me, just stop it, stop _this_?"

_Oh, John_, thought Sherlock, swallowing hard. _You were never the fool. _I_ was_.

He'd thought the stunt had been perfect in every way. He'd even been proud of it. All those years of intimate acquaintance with forensic science, physics, anatomy, and the psychology of shock could not possibly have led him astray. And it hadn't. None of the officers at Scotland Yard had raised queries. None of the newspapers. Proof that his act had been convincing lay in the fact that John was pacing right now before Sherlock's headstone, mercifully and warm-bloodedly alive: Moriarty's assassins, too, had been persuaded.

But he'd been a fool to think theatrical perfection could have persuaded John. John was not an empirical creature like Sherlock. John was a creature of the heart.

When layers of self-denial acquired through years of fear and obstinate self-hatred had obscured who he, Sherlock, was – to his brother, to those who'd known him for years, and even to himself – John had been able to peel past each of them, reach right through to the centre, and discover within it a heart alive and beating.

_If only you knew how right you were, John. Please don't stop asking for me to come back. Please don't stop believing in me._

He wanted to grant John Watson his miracle. He wanted with every fibre of his being and ounce of breath in his body to do it right this moment – to bound across this sad wasteland toward John, envelope him solidly in his arms, and hold him until he was convinced Sherlock was real and alive, desperately ashamed of everything he'd done, and too much in love with him ever to let him go.

But he could not. Not now, not yet.

His work was not done.

As long as any trace of Moriarty's darkness remained on this earth, the Play had to go on.

Finally John gathered himself, about-faced, and limped out of the cemetery. Sherlock followed him with his eyes until he disappeared.

He set his quivering mouth in a firm line and fought to regain his mask of indifference until he again remembered Molly's words.

_No one's watching you now, Sherlock._

He put his head in his hands and wept.

He remained there a long time, but when he finally looked up and darkness rather than tears obscured the distant marker where John had stood, he made himself a promise.

One day, the day Moriarty's shadow was driven from the world for good, he'd walk into John's flat not wearing a disguise, not hiding behind any mask or masquerading under any persona.

He'd just be Sherlock.

He'd tell John everything he'd ever wanted to say, in his own voice.

And from that day on, he would never act again.

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><p>AN: Thanks so much for reading! Reviews and any other form of feedback greatly appreciated.<p> 


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